Computational Polymer Chemist

IFF is a global leader in flavors fragrances food ingredients and bioscience solutions. Our innovations power everyday products through sustainable cutting-edge science.

At our Leiden sitehome to 45 scientists from 15 nationalitieswe have a proud history rooted in the early days of modern biotechnology. Today we continue to lead the industry in sustainable bio solutions.

Our R&D team designs microbial cell factories to create engineered enzymes used in food & beverages home & personal care animal nutrition grain processing biopolymers and more. We drive innovation from idea to production using generative AI advanced biomolecular engineering high throughput screening and full-scale testing at IFF manufacturing plants.
IFF Health & Biosciences is currently developing a new family of polysaccharides with broad industrial potential. This work spans biocatalysis polymer process design and application development requiring strong cross functional collaboration.

We are looking for an enthusiastic Computational Chemist to join our Designed Enzymatic Biomaterials (DEB) platform within the R&D team in this role you will apply your expertise in computational chemistry data science and polymer and material science to understand physical polymer properties and translate insights into innovative applications and product development. You will also collaborate closely with cross-functional partners including polymer scientists analytical chemists biochemists and data engineers.

Success in this role requires strong understanding of current computational approaches in polymer modelling and simulation in addition to proven experience in applying principles of data science to understand polymer properties. The ideal candidate will also possess software and data engineering experience a proactive mindset and the ability to draw useful insights from scientific datasets to assist in defining scientific directions of the project team.

This Leiden based role involves close interaction with international IFF teams. Occasional travel to R&D sites in Europe and North America may be required along with participation in online meetings outside standard working hours.

Where Youll Make a Difference
We have decades of experience in polymer science and bioscience. We combine enzyme engineering with polymer chemistry to create novel solutions that can be manufactured at scale. When the application allow it we want to become better at applying first-principles simulations to accelerate our research other applications when the distance between theory and full-scale tests is large we want improve at statistical inference and machine learning to use data-driven discovery. We hope you can help us with both of these goals!

Your responsibilities will include:

• Perform molecular simulations to predict physical properties of polysaccharides and their chemical derivatives and how these properties can add value in customer applications

• Analyze process data to help understanding the chemistry behind assay results and design new experiments

• Help to organize data to make analysis efficient and automatable

• Identify new opportunities for polysaccharides in diverse industrial applications

What Makes You the Right Fit

• PhD in Computational Chemistry Material Science Physical Chemistry or similar discipline with 1-3 years of industrial experience

• Experience running classical molecular dynamics simulations for molecular polymeric or soft matter systems using tools such as Schrödinger and LAMMPS.

• Proficiency with computational chemistry tools such as RDKit

• Strong knowledge of fundamental machine- and deep-learning using e.g. scikit-learn and pytorch

• Proven record in polymer innovation: turning ideas into projects and projects into products

How You Would Stand Out

• You have experience with water-soluble polymer formulation/characterization or biodegradable polymer design

• You have a passion for software engineering and documented experience with writing maintainable code (we mostly code in Python).

• You have documented experience with organizing data using domain software like Revvity Signals Benchling or graph databases or plain RDBMS

Why Choose Us

• Join a dynamic innovative and multicultural team of highly skilled scientists

• Grow professionally and build your career in biotechnology in an energetic inclusive and multicultural environment

• Attractive compensation and benefits such as:

• Individual Choice Budget of 8% of the annual base salary employee choice to be paid in monthly instalments or to exchange for additional time off up to 15 extra days per year

• 25 vacation days and 3 bridge days of which 2 of them are chosen by the employer

• Annual Incentive Plan

We are a global leader in taste scent and nutrition offering our customers a broader range of natural solutions and accelerating our growth strategy. At IFF we believe that your uniqueness unleashes our potential. We value the diverse mosaic of the ethnicity national origin race age sex or veteran status. We strive for an inclusive workplace that allows each of our colleagues to bring their authentic self to work regardless of their religion gender identity & expression sexual orientation or disability.

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